TheGamingEconomy’s Daily Digest brings you the prevalent business stories in gaming. In today’s news: Google rolls out hypercasual platform for low spec devices and networks; CD Projekt now Europe’s second-largest game company; and Oculus making ‘significant headway’ against HTC’s VR effort. Google rolls out hypercasual platform for low spec devices and networks Google’s experimental tech ‘workshop’ Area 120 has launched Gamesnacks, a new HTML5-based mobile gaming platform that supports lower-spec phones, as well as networks such as 2G and 3G. Geared towards fast [...]

It’s easy to feel instinctively optimistic about in-game advertising. In recent years there’s been a powerful sense that in-game ads aren’t simply an increasingly valuable means of income for developers and publishers; perhaps they’re now understood and embraced by more consumers and industry figures than ever before. Furthermore, there is an ever more diverse spread of games, markets and consumers where ads are fitting. And now it feels like there are a greater number of platforms, approaches and tools through which [...]

Earlier this year mobile monetisation platform outfit Fyber launched a significantly reworked version of its Fyber FairBid technology, having celebrated 10 years in business in the previous months. But what have the team learned about the changing in-game advertising landscape over that decade? And what does it mean that Fyber FairBid offers a unified auction technology for app bidding ‘built from the ground up for the in-app programmatic era’? TheGamingEconomy caught up with Fyber president Offer Yehudai to learn more about the [...]

Game ad tech specialist Synative has moved to make its Playable Studio platform free for devs looking to build playable ‘Try Now’ demos for Google Play. In essence Synative offers in Playable Studio an accessible platform for building playable ads, all without the need to write a single line of code. Using that platform game developers – or their marketing or PR colleagues with little-to-no dev experience – can build demos of their games that exist as a playable ad. Those [...]

Tencent, Qualcomm, and Vivo recently announced a new partnership, with a view to refining game experiences by harnessing the potential of on-device mobile AI. We’ve all heard so much about AI in recent months that it’s easy to assume any reference to it is simply over-enthusiastic marketing speak. But what this collection of tech giants have underway is pretty fascinating. It’s also somewhat confusing, as it’s a little complicated on the technical side of things. So let’s take a look at [...]

There are two main reasons playable ads offer a beguiling option for game developers, publishers, and marketing teams. Primarily, of course, they give a player a chance to try a game without having to spend a penny or download a kilobyte. Equally, there’s a good chance that those who do click through and download the game are likely to be readily engaged, retained users who are more willing to spend money. After all, if they like the playable demo enough to step [...]

Arguably, one of the most crucial aspects of performance advertising for in-app gaming is creative. From leveraging the correct ad format – depending on your user acquisition, retention, and reactivation strategies – to multivariate testing of creative across those different target segments, gaming developers need to place a lot of importance on creative output. TheGamingEconomy speaks exclusively with Jeff Marshall (pictured below), CEO, CrossInstall, about its newly launched Creatives as a Service (CaaS) platform, to help gaming developers do just [...]

TheGamingEconomy visited Casual Connect Europe this week, where we interviewed Simon Spaull, managing director, EMEA, AppLovin, about the challenges and opportunities of in-app monetisation for gaming developers both big and small. TheGamingEconomy: How do independent mobile gaming developers gain traction in such a competitive environment? Simon Spaull: Financially, it’s a challenge. If you want to get to the top of an app chart, the predominant way is to buy users; and when you’re competing against the larger companies, it’s difficult, as you [...]